Chapter 46: Ex-Designated Weapon
Chapter 46:
Ex-Designated Weapon
Ex-Designated Weapon
W
HEN THE EXPERIMENTAL
shoulder cannon deployed, the Center Trigonus—Super Eva’s window to higher dimensions—began amassing more power, until Shinji’s chest felt like it couldn’t hold any more.
“What is this?” he asked.
Back when the Eva’s S
2
Engine had changed form, and most of its mass had slid into the other dimensions, nearly limitless energy had flowed into Super Eva. The Eva and Shinji were reborn, but in exchange, his mother’s spirit had faded away.
Power still flowed into Super Eva’s chest, where the energy bounced around within the quantum wave mirrors built into the restraint armor. Normally, Shinji could sense energy flowing out to his limbs, but now he felt like the flow had been dammed up, and his heartbeat grew stronger.
The display on the right shoulder weapon’s status window switched to a more detailed block diagram; Rei Trois had somehow managed to pull it up—and quickly, too—despite the extraordinary acceleration.
Her eyes ran over the display, and she said, “This…this system. This is no positron cannon. It’s designed to harvest the particle stream directly from the Center Trigonus.”
The idea didn’t sound so far-fetched. For the first time, Shinji read the weapon’s designated name—or rather, the knowledge had entered his awareness—EXW-038E.
“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t think Maya-san would’ve gotten away with giving us a weapon more powerful than a positron cannon, so she wrote ‘Positron Weapon’ on the paperwork and gave it some nonsense EX number.”
Though Trois could only see Shinji’s back, he was clearly in pain.
“Ikari-kun?” she asked with concern.
The sound of Super Eva’s pounding heartbeat was like the underside of a waterfall. But Shinji was still holding on as the power built up in his chest. Now that Yui’s soul had gone away, Unit One’s body was his body.
The Victor on the left came in swinging with its staff. Shinji held the Bizen at a shallow angle, and rather than block the strike, he let the staff scrape down his blade with a shower of sparks—putting his opponent’s waist within kicking range. But instead, Super Eva’s foot struck the Victor’s shield, and the recoil separated them. Without Shinji telling it to, the FCS locked on to the Victor and waited for the enemy to cross into the cannon’s line of fire.
But…
“But I don’t know what’s going to come out of that gun,” Shinji said.
For one thing, he didn’t know how such a massive volume of energy would be transferred into the cannon. When all that other-dimensional energy underwent quantization, how many digits would be needed to express the number of electronvolts?
Surely more than the waveguide could withstand.
But while Shinji was thinking, the trigger pulled of its own accord. Swirling within his chest, the tremendous energy leaped to his shoulder, then to the exposed chamber where the A.T. coil contained it for just an instant, and then—
Inside the plug, Rei Trois wasn’t able to see the cannon fire.
Whatever projectile it had released immediately caused all the electronics to shut down. But she felt a powerful impact, followed by a pulling sensation. She felt it on her skin, though the sensation came and went with terrific speed.
Shinji saw the weapon fire through Super Eva’s eyes. The baryon particles made the quantum jump into the cannon and then rushed out, shattering the weapon into tiny pieces in the process. The projectile emitted an astonishingly powerful gravitational field, so much so that it slightly bent the space around it and destroyed Eva-01’s electronics systems, which had been hardened against electromagnetic damage. The projectile flew at almost the speed of light and struck the Victor’s power shield.
In his stretched-out perspective of time, Shinji saw the projectile enter the Victor’s chest and destroy the plate on its back.
What just happened?
The shot from the new cannon passed through the enemy’s shield as if it weren’t even there and struck the Victor’s body—although, to be precise, the projectile never actually touched the Victor. Rather, the weapon caused massive proton decay and turned the majority of the enemy’s insides into neutrinos, bosons, and a whole lot of heat. Then it went on in the same manner to destroy the plate that marked the Victor as Armaros’ kin.
One day, Shinji supposed, he would return to Tokyo-3, where Maya would have been deliberating over what to name the weapon. Shinji couldn’t begin to imagine what she might come up with.
The magnetic monopoles destroyed the Victor without being affected at all, and after they passed through, they vanished into the wall of the tunnel that stretched between the portals.